Sunday, June 15, 2014

Joseph Raz on Dworkin on the Unity of Value

Joseph Raz has posted a new paper at SSRN:A Hedgehog's Unity of ValueFrom the preface:"Dworkin was nothing if not an inventive and innovative theorist. While like all of us deeply embedded in his time and the ideas of his time, he was carving his views out of his own imaginative resources, to an ever growing degree free from the need to grapple, in his own contributions, with the conventional paradigms set by others, and at the same time, in his critical commentaries on events and ideas, dissecting the presuppositions, ideas and writings and exposing the fallacies of opponents. As is to be excepted, som ideas, or perhaps it is better to call them intellectual tendencies, marked, often dominated, the movement of thought in much of his writings. One dominant trend is the striving towards unity. And Unity is my topic today, or more specifically the unity of value in Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs. I will reflect on some of the many things he writes when dealing with that theme. My aim is to clarify his view about the unity of value. In doing that I will meander in different directions, trying out some interpretations before turning to others. In other words, I will try to interpret his views in ways that will turn out not to fit them. In part to show that the interpretations do not fit, and in part to see how closely his views resemble them even so. I hope that by the end of this journey we will better understand his view about the unity of value."See my previous post "Papers on Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs".